As a product manager, joining a new organization is always challenging, regardless of how much experience you have. You are the product expert, and are expected to know everything about the user, market, the product. But on your first day, you are probably realizing that you know nothing about the product, or the organization you’ve just joined.
To meet everyone’s expectations, especially your own, you will have to learn fast - and asking the right questions will set you up for success.
Get to know your product
First and foremost, you need to learn about your product. What is the product, what are the major features, what is the target customer base? Ask for any feature maps, user flows, value proposition or analytics that already exist. All this will give you a view into the current performance of the product in the market, user personae and segmentation, and will give you a good foundation to think about ways to make improvements over time.
In addition, start asking technical questions - what does the tech stack look like, and if there are architectural diagrams you can review. Understanding the architecture of your product will make conversations with engineers easier - and will allow you to plan better long term as you will have a high level of understanding of all of the services your product relies on.
Ultimately, one of the best ways to learn about the product is to start using it. Make sure to ask about getting access to the product, and the environments where you can use it, poke around, and explore.
Get to know the team
As a product manager, you will sit at the center of many conversations. Meeting as many people as you can early on is extremely valuable. Make sure to get to know everyone on your team - both in your product organization (this may include product marketing managers, UX, product operations, or data analysts), and on your engineering team. Depending on the size of the organization, getting to know everyone may take one week - or a few weeks, so make sure to keep your calendar up to date, and meeting invites flowing.
One of the key relationships you will have will be with your technical leader. Talk to them as soon as you can, and take some time to speak with as many engineers on your team as you can. To start, standups are a great way to get to know more about how your engineers work, and what areas they are experts in. More likely than not, you will be working with these colleagues day to day, so establishing a good relationship early on will go a long way.
Beyond your engineering team, ask your manager who are the other stakeholders in your organization you should meet. support, customer success, sales, business development are some of the roles you will be interacting with frequently. Reaching out to them in the first few days in your new role will give everyone in the organization a signal that a new PM has joined the team, and that they have a new resource to connect with.
Get to know your organization
While you are meeting all the team members, getting to know the team dynamics, processes and practices - make sure to ask about the short and long term vision for the product and the organization.
Ask to see the product road map, features in development (on the team Jira board) and what pain points are they looking to address. What are the metrics the team is using to measure success, and progress of the product? Ask whether this information is documented anywhere - on a team wiki page, in a slide deck, or in Looker, Heap or Mixpannel. What are some of the challenges the team and the organizations have faced over time, and recently?
Don’t forget the leadership, and the long term vision of the organization. Company mission statement, strategic initiatives, KPIs are important to understand from day one, to make sure that you and your new team are moving forward in the same direction. Ask if there is a recording of a recent town hall that you can listen to or watch to get a better sense of the tone the leadership is setting for the organization.
Starting a new job is exciting, and overwhelming under any circumstances. But in the current environment where many of us are working remotely, and teams are changing quickly, starting a new role prepared, knowing what to look for will set you and your team up for success.
Milica Golubovic is a Product Manager, with experience in Education Technology, and SasS product development. As a member of the BPMA Blog team, Milica is collaborating to create informative, engaging content for the Product Management community.
